A B2B marketing masterclass with PwC's Global CMO, Antonia Wade

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. She is the CMO at PwC, one of the biggest professional services companies in the world. So if anyone knows how B2B works, it's going to be her. This is a brilliant conversation. She has so much experience and knowledge about B2B. And her book is tremendously useful if you want to understand the art and science of getting B2B marketing right. Here's my conversation with Antonia. Now, we are talking B2B. I love B2B. And I'm joined by somebody who also loves B2B so much that she's actually written the book on it. Now, anyone who's watching, here it is, transforming the B2B buyer journey, Antonio Waite, CMO at PwC.

1:08Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Yes, great to have you. So tell me a bit about your journey to this point. How did you get into B2B and how did you get into PwC and the world of professional services? Right. So, I mean, I did a few things in my early career from startup to research to government, but I really kind of found my place, if you will, at Accenture. And I joined there as a consultant and then I moved into their marketing team. And it's a wonderful place to learn your craft if you're a marketer because they're very good at it, very well invested, really understand the value of marketing.

1:39And I did a number of very, very interesting jobs there. And that really kind of got my passion for B2B marketing going. I decided that, you know, I really understood and enjoyed working in professional services and Accenture is very well organized, very good at marketing. But I wanted to go and learn to do something entirely different. so I went to Thomson Reuters much more of a b2b product company we might want to come on and talk about the difference between services and products and b2b and an organization where they were very immature in terms of their marketing so I remember saying to my predecessor you know can I look at the marketing strategy and plan and we got a list of 400 events and that was kind of all they did so that was a big transformational lift where we really moved to being able to attribute for every dollar what would we get back where how should we think about the buyer and a very different way of working with sales as well as really putting in a great some great technologies into the marketing environment I then it's quite funny to think now because at that time I was traveling all around the world I had this big global job and I was like I just want to spend some time home with the kids I'm going to get a more UK based job so I got a job with a UK professional services firm called Capita and of course then COVID hit so I could have carried on doing my global job and sat at home but it's what it was um but that was quite an interesting uh role uh leading a company that had done a lot of inorganic growth they'd made lots of acquisitions and bringing all of those brands together into one and again putting in the technology to really understand what our marketing was doing for our teams um and then on to pwc where i've been for about two and a half years the book came about actually because i had a few months between capita and pwc and my husband was like please don't be at home with nothing to do you're going to drive me insane so that's where the book started to happen books born in covid then oh a gap between yeah exactly um and then yeah so i now i'm the global uh cmo at pwc um which is one of the world's most trusted brands we deliver professional services across assurance tax consulting and deals um in my team we look after if it's helpful just to give a bit of a sense of what we look after so we look after the strategy, messaging and governance all around the brand.

3:50We have a team that looks at campaigns and content across the big business priorities for PwC. So there's big global campaigns. We look after the sales and marketing requirements into the technology stack. So a lot of work with Salesforce, like your previous guest, and onto the dot com as well. And then we have a team that looks at supporting our biggest accounts, which is where a lot of our revenue and growth comes from, and also looks to share best practice from a sort of sales methodology. And we have a marketing academy for trying to upskill marketers and salespeople all around the world. Wow.

4:24There's a lot there, isn't there? And we're getting into how do you manage it and what makes successful B2B marketing? My little connection to your current employer was my first job, actually, when I was at university, I took a year out, was actually at Coopers & Lightbrand in the tax department. And very weirdly, why I'm in marketing now goes back to a chance event where I was doing tax returns, which I find funny now because I hate doing tax returns now. I've got an image of myself coming to you with the form. I know, I know. And actually, I used to make some extra money at university by doing tax returns for people kind of thing.

4:57This is the hidden side of John Evans that no one else ever sees. I know, people are always really shocked. I did an economics and finance degree. I started in tax departments at Coopers and Libras. But I was sat opposite this guy and I was telling him how he could save£10 ,000 in tax, you know, because I'd worked out. Funny story, actually. I worked out that if he spent a weekend outside the UK, he would qualify for less than 180 days in the country and he could save 10 grand. So I said, you can go away and have the biggest weekend imaginable and I'll save you the tax. Anyway, as part of that conversation, I said, really interesting job.

5:31What do you do? And it turns out as a marketing director at a data company called Dun & Bradstreet. And just through that, I was like, oh, I fancy being on that side of the table. So it's just one of those weird moments in life where I went, how do you get into the kind of job you do? And then so I left university and decided I'd go into marketing. So there we go. So Cooper's helped me out. Anyway, so one of the things I think, so I've now been doing B2B marketing as well, actually, for the last four years. It's quite fun to be talking to you about this because having done B2C for many years, I'm now in the kind of B2B environment comparing between the two.

6:01How does B2B and B2C differ, do you think? Because there's this perennial debate about, is it different? Is it the same? How do you think it's different or not? Well, I think, first of all, lumping B2B into one category is probably not that helpful. It would be a bit like talking about everything in B2C as if it was one monolithic thing. And even if you just take a kind of fairly straightforward division, so you've got B2B products or those types of services where the reason why you're buying it is pretty well defined, It's not a high price point. You know, that is a different type of marketing motion than if you're selling into the services space.

6:40And that can be across technology or finance, professional services, where you're really looking at much longer. I mean, these things can take five years sometimes to sell. And then you're usually embarking on a relationship, which can last another five to 10 years, perhaps even longer. And so those two mechanics are quite different. and actually I would say B2B product and more straightforward, cheaper services can be a little feel somewhat like B2C, those ones which are much more relationship oriented in nature tend to be very different. So if we focus on that sort of side, because I think those are the most different from B2C, I've talked a little bit about the length of time that it takes to sell and the types of relationships that you're embarking on.

7:23And often, particularly if you think about consulting for example you and the client are doing things together that neither of you have ever done before so it's a high trust relationship it is based on chemistry it's based on relationship it's based on feeling like this is the person that i want to do difficult things with this is the person who i want to entrust my career and livelihood to because i believe that working with this person or this group of people we can get done the big difficult things that we need to do which will be the things that mean my company survives or not over the next five years.

7:56So the stakes are very high. And so what buyers are looking for is very different than I want to buy a piece of software that costs$100, right? So it's a completely different thing. So when you're looking at that kind of relationship purchase, it starts to feel very different from B2C because it's not about lodging a message into my mind that I can recall for a reasonably inexpensive purchase where there's very little judgment about you know it's something quite different um and my relationship with a b2c particularly fmcg brand might be very very like i might feel a lot of passion around that relationship but at the end of the day if that relationship goes for whatever reason i don't lose my house i don't lose my job i don't lose the company so the stakes are just very very different that's that's really powerful isn't it um it's funny actually one of the things i often think as well is that even though i'd say i've worked in b2c all my career actually um even in b2c you have a b2b relationship with your customers i remember doing a doing a um a scale-up brand in in juice and actually i worked out that for me to get availability to get into all the stores i went to get to there were no more than 40 people i had to go and sell to and so even in even in b2c sometimes there are sort of intermediaries, whether, you know, retailers or distributors, where you're actually the number of people you need to reach are very small, but they're very in demand and they're very hard, you know, very, very hard to reach.

9:19So, and it's similar for you, isn't it? You know, you've got, you know, very influential people, very time poor, you know, very hard to reach. How do you get to those people? Because I think that's one of the conundrums that you have in B2B, isn't it? Is how do you reach those really difficult to reach people? Well, I think the first thing is, it goes a bit to what you're saying, which is I think for a long time, B2B marketers have used B2C metrics as a reason for trying to quantify their success, which tend towards volume. And it's not a volume game, right? There are some services that you might sell in professional services.

9:51There's two, 300 people in the world that could ever buy it, right? It's a precision game. It's not a volume game. And, you know, I sometimes come into teams and they say to me, oh, you know, it's been a great campaign because we got, I don't know, 70 ,000 hits on the website, whatever. And I'm like, well, I don't really understand how to interpret that data. Because if your target audience was 75 ,000, that's pretty good. If your target audience was 7 million, that's pretty poor. If your target audience was 70, which it probably is, it feels like you might have used the wrong channels in terms of accessing your audience and you probably didn't get to them at all.

10:24So if you think about a lot of those, particularly in the services space, it is a precision game and it is about then looking at your marketing budget and saying actually even with somewhat restricted marketing budgets if you actually really look at the size of the target audience you need to get into your correlation between dollars and individuals probably much higher than you think it is and you know sometimes we look at b2c budgets go oh we wish that we could have that we're just not trying to play the same game i'm not trying to get in front of 100 million people i'm trying to get in front of 100 and therefore you use your dollars in a slightly different ways.

10:56So in terms of your question though about how do you get in front of them, I mean, you have to really understand them extremely well. And so it's always interesting to me when I talk to B2B marketers who don't really invest in talking to their clients, listening to their clients, using insights, talking to sales, talking to their own CEOs or CFOs, you know, the role of really deeply understanding how, what are the things that these people read, How do they engage with each other? At what point do they want to engage with you? Versus when do you need to use third parties to get your messages in front of them?

11:29All of those things are really deeply rooted into insight. And you can be reasonable and be precise about that if you get your target addressable market right. But quite often in B2B as well, because we're still learning, you'll go to the organization and say, OK, well, who's this campaign for? And I'll say, everyone in the C-suite. Not that helpful. You need to force your organization to be precise about who you want to get in front of. so you can make your dollars work really hard for you. You remind me of that. I had a very short freelance career. It lasted about six months. But the most successful thing I did in that little freelance career...

11:58That freelance career was when you employed yourself. I'm just going to tell you that. It was, yes. That's your shortest career. It was, indeed. And it's where I came up with this podcast, actually. That was invented in my little freelance career. But I just created this very simple presentation called 10 Things No One Knows About a CMO. And I got hired by a number of different agencies to go, give us some insight into the CMO. and what was amazed is how little people actually knew about the CMO job and what they need and how they make decisions and you know how they buy things and that kind of thing so it's fascinating so I love your insight there start with you know your target audience and get insight into what they need and one of the things I talk about in the book and we might come on talk about it which is actually it's not for example if you're trying to sell something to the CMO it's probably not the CMO throughout the whole process at a certain point their team will get involved and then perhaps procurement and then perhaps finance and and so you're probably shifting from marketing to the cmo at a certain point they'll then open the door to somebody in their team who will actually then execute the buying decision and they might come in and out of that and so it's also about being clear about who is your target addressable market at each point of their process because it might change so for example when you're thinking about attribution through marketing automation and there's a sort of traditional view that as the seniority of the client goes up you're getting closer to a purchase decision actually in my experience often it's the other way around so you pique the interest of a senior person they then commission somebody in their team to go and do the research and execute against the buying process fill in the statement of work and the and bloody blah so actually seeing a um a decrease in seniority actually is more of a buying signal than an increase.

13:40So it's sort of quite interesting. You need to sort of challenge yourself around the conventional ways because you have to really root it into what is the client actually doing versus what does sort of perceived wisdom of seniority telling us? Yeah, you're so right. It's fascinating. The most interesting conversation I had when I was doing the brief consultancy was basically when you get a brief, the first thing you need to say is to the client is, would you give me 20 minutes of your time to understand the brief bit better? Because one of the things I started my presentation saying, the brief is rarely the actual brief, because often it's written to a template.

14:12It's often written by someone junior. Things have sometimes changed, even between the brief being written and the submission being made. And my top advice is just ask for 20 minutes at a time of your client and just ask some basic questions like, you know, what was the business problem that led to this brief? So you understand the context. How will you make the decision, you know, between the different agencies that are pitching? You know, who decides? You know, because sometimes you may never have met the decision maker. Well, how do you get, you know, an excuse to spend time with them? But what surprised me about every agency that I spoke to when I was doing this training, not one of them thought to do that.

14:46And they all said the same thing. John, we can't possibly phone the clients. I'm like, why? Because actually, you know, all you're saying is saying you've spent a lot of time on this brief. You're putting a lot of resource behind it. It's a very big decision. It's going to have big impacts, as you were talking about, in terms of like the career. You know, people get fired over getting this stuff wrong, don't they? or people get promoted out of getting it right why wouldn't the client want to spend a bit of time helping you do an even better pitch totally and you might just win it you know let me tell you a funny story so this is actually a previous job not a pwc um and we went to market for agencies to help us with um some work that we were doing um and the brief was here's the here are the bios of the people who will make the decision you have four hours with us and we just have to like you better than everyone else no way and the agencies freaked out like it was really challenging brief for them because at the end of the day that's probably i mean all of these agencies could have done a fabulous job and we could see that we know the creds we know what they the work that they've done but at the end of the day when you're going to work on something over a period of years where the stakes are as high as you said you just have to know that you really like the people you're doing it with and they'll go to bat for you and that they'll deeply understand you and that there's something more than a transactional relationship i i think you've hit the nail on the head there because I know if I go back to the I so I've mostly been at the buying side I'm now in the seller side it was a bit weird but anyway I've mostly been the buyer and I would say every time I'm on a pitch process at the end of it I'll go and look at what was written down in the documents and in the presentations and it rarely correlates the decision I ended up making and actually if I deconstruct my decision it probably was who do I trust to do the work or do the job that I want to be done and actually it's a lot more about whether I feel like I could leave the room and entrust the team that I've just presented to go and deliver for me.

16:32And it's rarely about what they say, because most agencies have the same creds, the same logos on the sheet, the same kind of unique process they go through to get to the answer, you know, the same proof of concept. They've often got the same toolkit because they wouldn't be in the room, right, if you didn't think they could do the job. So actually, I think your chemistry idea is completely spot on. It's interesting. I remember talking to a client actually when I was at Accenture and, you know, there'd been some problem because technology, right? I mean, it's never straightforward technology. And I remember talking to him about it and he was like, look, you know, it's tech, right?

17:03And we're doing innovative things. We're doing difficult things that have never been done before. So of course, things are going to go wrong. But what I need to know is that when something goes wrong, the person I'm going to like hold my hand out to as we take a jump off the cliff together is the person that I want to be holding hands with at that point. And the person I believe is going to go to bat for me, is going to go the extra mile, tell me what I need to hear. And those types of things are really important if you're trying to move some of the world's biggest companies to do very difficult, new and innovative things.

17:32Now, another thing I know you're passionate about is it does come down to the people. And we think, don't we, that B2B is a lot more data led and B2C is all about emotion and it's much more rational. But actually, you're buying a relationship in a way, aren't you? You're buying trust in other people. And, you know, we're talking about, you know, who you put in the pitch team can be really important. You know, have you understood what the, you know, Have you developed relationships that are going to create that trust? That can be so important, can't it? Who's in the room? I mean, the way that I think about it, I talk about it a bit in the book, is that when you're in a buying process, you're really operating at three different levels.

18:07First of all, you're operating as somebody who's a representative of your company, right? And so that's where things like purpose and values of the supplier become really important because you want to work with a company that you believe has similar shared values to you. at a second level you are operating as a functional buyer right i mean there's some things that i need and i am the deep subject matter expert in it and i am in market to buy those things and then the third level is this sort of human chemistry level because i want to be communicated to and i want to work with people who understand me get me who understand what makes me tick and it's a relationship because you're going to work in a partnership over a number of years which so then it's more but you know some of the more um a bit like as you said first date marriage like those types of things start to matter and so when you're in uh when you're in that actual point of purchase um but actually i would say in the run-up to it as well it's it's very complicated and nuanced it's not it's not straightforward and you'd never really know whether the buyer is over indexing on being a representative of the company over indexing on being a subject matter expert making the purchase or over indexing on the relationship aspect of it so you have to appeal to all three simultaneously and that's a very very tricky and nuanced game when you're in b2b marketing and sales it really really is and it goes back to your first point about the importance of understanding the customer asking the questions because the thing that used to drive me insane was when i was being pitched to i often sit through an hour pitch and 50 minutes i'm being talked at right and very rarely am i being asked any questions or or what do i think or actually you know is the brief change or you know what's most important to me and i think the art of understanding the customer and really getting out of them what they want and you know is you know you know asking you know is the pitch team the right team you know i mean i know you're saying before as well about you know here are all the partners in the firm which partner would you like to work with who's got the particular skills that might you know help you in this job we also looked at some research again in the book which shows that you know the things that companies think that people are looking for in that pitch process versus what people are actually looking for and quite often to the point you're making before you wouldn't be in the room at all if you hadn't proved in those things and yet you're wasting so much of your valuable pitch time on retelling them the things that they a already know and b have already made a decision about because you're there and so you know to your point about how you maximize that time which is rare and like don't get very much of it and how have you thought about really making sure that yes you put the right people in but also that you're talking about the things the buyers really want to hear about rather than let me hear you let me restate your problem for you and let's show you more creds that you've already looked at because that's why we're here so all of that stuff becomes quite important now i love this and this is going to connect love in a beautiful way to the chat i had with colin so um you've got um the attributes that are most important to the customer versus what you might think sort of thing which is fascinating seeing the difference but But the top three, so number one, brand and reputation.

21:09In terms of that's what's most important, even in a buying situation. You know, having a trusted brand, having a well-respected brand, having a brand that people understand and feel like is relevant is incredibly important throughout the whole thing. So sometimes people make this sort of slight odd thing about is it brand or is it demand generation? It's like, well, the brand actually is helping you across the whole piece. And if all things being equal and actually even priced to one side, a strong brand will help you in that decision making point. And I think particularly in B2B because, you know, up to 12 to 15 people can be involved in any one decision.

21:46And so the strength of your brand and the way in which your brand resonates with those 15 people at a point at which they're trying to come together and agree something can be massively the defining thing. so this idea that brand is only helpful at the beginning part of the journey is complete um complete completely not true and actually i've talked about you know the relationship aspect some of the clients that professional services companies have will be clients for 5 10 15 20 years sometimes and so maintaining that brand relevance through that period of time is also pretty important um because what you don't want to do because at that point your competitors are going to come in and start trying to you know put in different messages compete with you in that client environment so the more connection the buyer or the client feels to your brand the more loyal they're likely to be so brands also doing a lot for you once you're actually in the relationship i mean i have to say if i were to pick so my four years being in b2b the number one factor in system one success is brand and it's been really really interesting because what i noticed is i assumed I'd be bottom of funnel the whole time, you know, last clicks and, you know, let's buy SEO and all that kind of thing.

22:56But I mean, fascinated actually what's really, really worked and paid off is actually building the brand or thought leadership or creating content and being at events and kind of, you know, PR and reputation building and those kind of things. And what's happened is, you know, we've gone from, in our case, gone from sort of having to hustle and try and, you know, sneak in and try and win business to actually people come to us. because or if we're in the meeting, what shocks me now is everyone's already heard of us. They've already read the books. They've already listened to podcasts. They've already seen the latest research we've done.

23:26They've been following us on LinkedIn. And some, amazingly, some customers are even apologizing, going, I'm sorry it's taken us so long to get you in the meeting sort of thing. And what brand does is it changes it from a transactional trying to milk every last click to actually having a much better relationship. You don't have to discount prices suddenly. you know you're adding value and you're there as a peer rather than as a and this goes back to the point about are you measuring the right things you know you're using b2c measures for b2b actually when you look at the consulting market for example the higher the degree of kind of salience and relevance that your brand has to the buyer the higher your price premium because people will say yes this brand is worth more than i feel like i'm paying for it and that's I mean, that's incredibly important.

24:14Being able to charge the right price for the right services is absolutely part of what marketing needs to be doing in B2B. And so actually, because we don't have fixed prices like you do in B2C. And so therefore you are that price negotiation and being able to protect your pricing is pretty fundamental part of what you're trying to do with your brand marketing. Yeah, I thought about that. That's a really good point. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the data points. There's fascinating data here, which also I think emphasise the importance of brand. The one killer stat I found from your book is 94 % of buyers research online before they've had any contact with you as a seller, which is what 19 in every 20 people are doing the research first.

24:57So that suggests, doesn't it, that your digital presence, your website, your LinkedIn profile, your fame building is incredibly important to influence future buyers. I mean, I was surprised it wasn't 100%, honestly, like today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are. Who are the 6 % of people that are just phoning you straight away? Probably people who just know you really, really well. Maybe they're repeat buyers, aren't they? Ex-customers go, yeah, I'll just give Antonio a call. Yeah, and look, there is a portion, you know, when you're thinking, particularly if you're thinking about professional services or some of these kind of higher value services, where a buyer is trying to decide whether they should do anything at all.

25:36So they're looking at macroeconomic trends and looking at kind of where they want to compete. They're looking at their own business strategy and trying to say, OK, what do we need to do differently to take advantage of the opportunities in the market or to protect our business against some of the externalities that are happening? What is it that I might need to do? And then they go into pretty early shaping of a business case. OK, I can see that we might need to think about our supply chains differently or how we resource our data, whatever it is. And maybe we need to do something. And they start to kind of put together a bit of a hypothesis around that.

26:06at all of that period um what they don't want to do is incur what a friend of mine calls the debt of obligation by actually going to the supplier directly because as soon as you do that even if you know them really really well you're all you're kind of implying you're going to buy something and actually in b2b your biggest um your biggest competitor is always in usher right so we've decided we're not going to do anything we don't think it's imperative enough yet to do something actually second biggest can often be that the companies think that they can do it themselves so so in that whole part of the bias thinking process they don't know that they want to do anything at all so of course they're not going to phone up a seller because they haven't even decided that they're going to do anything however your thought leadership and uh to some extent certain types of case studies the way in which you engage with their peer set um the way in which you might position thought pieces in you know third party art you know economist ft that sort of thing that starts to shape the way that buyers are thinking about the world and that shaping of the way that buyers think about the world ultimately will help you but you can't it's really hard to get attribution and that's not about clicks and so there's a whole load of stuff that's happening before they even get to your website and then once they get onto your website they're looking for to educate themselves about specific things they tend to be looking for case studies or it might be that they're not the primary buyer they're in procurement or in finance So it's supporting the buying process.

27:27You need to want to learn a bit more about your company on those three levels that I talked about before. So there's a whole world of things that are happening through the digital channels. And what's interesting and nice about that from a B2B marketing perspective is that, you know, when I started in B2B a long time ago, the job of marketing really was to support the sales effort, right? And the sort of thing was, you know, the buyers would come to sales and you needed to sort of support that process. now this huge percentage of things are happening through digital channels and those are all channels really that marketing controls and so suddenly there's a real shift in terms of the insights you can get about what clients are doing there's a real shift in terms of the types of things that you want to be famous for in the market how you choose to position your media and paid media and drive people to that and that's very exciting for b2b marketers but i'm not sure we've really necessarily already stepped into that role that privileged role that we now have that's such an important point i remember even my system one journey actually i think when i turned up i was like i'm not sure anyone knew what i was here to do and also i wrote oh i've got no budget no one understands what i do and they're like oh john are you going to design the stand for the trade show you know it's kind of that sort of thing i'm here to create demands right and it will take a bit of time but trust me you know we'll get there and it will happen fortunately that's what's happening which is wonderful but and i think and i think one of the things that i observe and think about and i've talked to some clients about actually which is how often do you feel like perhaps you probably get the marketing team you deserve because if you've underfunded it you've not set high enough expectations you've not really invested in the art of the possible then you probably are going to get people who will design the brochure wear for you but actually i think it is important for b2b marketers to push to show their value in a different way but i also think that the most enlightened uh companies in the world um make space and room for that um and you You know, there is still, I think, in the B2B environment, you know, B2B marketers trying really, really hard to be able to make that case and show what they could do to be a lever and driver for growth into a pretty unreceptive audience.

29:28So, like, my ask of anyone who's not in marketing would be just try and think a bit differently about what you're asking marketing to do and perhaps allow them a bit of optionality in that. So, show them, like, let them show you what they could do. Well, I loved your phrase in the book, actually, from cost center to profit center. Yeah. That's really astute. how do you make the case though because i think that's the challenge a lot of people a lot of reason a lot of people end up in the sort of bottom of funnel is that they're being asked to get results tomorrow or in the next quarter because then the results come out um a lot of things you're talking about and i'm talking about would be maybe one to three to five years in terms of having effects so how do you make the case to look beyond the short term well i mean so just on your first point i mean my absolute philosophy is that marketing should make you money not cost you money right so that's like a going in position and i would encourage anyone who's in b2b marketing to really think about that again how are you showing that you're making well as opposed to costing money and that's a very different type of conversation that you'll have so i guess uh and part of the reason why i wrote the book was to start to think about well you can use marketing to do different things depending on the buyer so i talked a little bit about that buyer that's not even in market not there's still shaping a business case right then you've got a portion of people who are actually in market making some choices about who they want to buy you've actually got the whole pitch bid process that we talked about um and actually uh as i say in the book it's a piece of data that says the large professional services type of companies uh in the main um 80 of revenue sits with 20 of the clients so there's also a job of marketing to do there both to drive loyalty but to also expand share of wallet particularly if you sell a lot of things like are your top clients buying as much of your services as they can i think that those are five very different things that you can ask marketing to do.

31:13And you probably can't ask them to do all of it unless you have a really large budget. And so what I try and talk to execs about is where does the dollar help you the most? And that depends on the financial performance of your company right now and your business strategy. So if you're looking to enter into new markets, if you're trying to move up the strategic curve, which lots of B2B companies are trying to do, then you need to focus on that first area. If you are in a company that's performing poorly and you really just need to get the sales in, you should divert your marketing funding to supporting sales.

31:44If you're in a company where a lot of your revenue sits in your biggest clients and you know that and you have a broad set of services and you know that not many clients are buying a full suite of services that they could, perhaps you'd be better off putting it into more of that kind of account based marketing world. And so then it becomes a strategy conversation and about making choices about the dollar as opposed to tell me what the sales targets are they've got to make them this quarter therefore we have to back into a marketing and that is okay if that's where you want to spend your marketing dollars but i think you have to open the aperture to what can marketing do to you do for you sorry and i remember having a conversation in a previous company i said look you know if i get it that you want a lot of support for sales from the marketing dollars But at a certain level in this company, you know, if you need that many millions of dollars to support your sales team, I actually think you've got a sales performance issue, not a marketing performance issue, right?

32:37So you think you have to be pretty robust about the choices that the business is making by choosing to put a marketing dollar to support sales as opposed to create future demand or to create expanded share of wallet and existing clients. it's quite a challenge that you described because you know in most of my experience working with sales teams i work quite a lot is that they shout a lot they they demand things today you know and and they represent the customer so there's always it's always urgent oh the customer needs this we got a trade show next week all that all that kind of thing for to say that actually we're going to invest our marketing time in bringing you customers tomorrow you know although they rationally get it they're because under pressure to deliver the number in the next quarter that can be quite a tense conversation to have can be and i think that you know one of the things that i suggest in the book is if you really map out the buyer journey and you do it as a collaborative marketing and sales exercise and no part of it is 0 % sales and 100 % marketing or 100 % sales and not 0 % marketing.

33:31So then I sort of think about it as like kind of volume dials, like just different amounts. Work out like what are marketing and sales doing for the buyer in this part of the buyer's process and how are you helping each other to get the buyer to make decisions or to speed up their decisions that's quite a helpful place to start rather than having this kind of like i need leads you know so this classic paradigm sales going oh you know marketing give me terrible leads and marketing going we give all these leads and nothing ever happens with them it's just you're just focusing on one such narrow part of it whereas at least if you just spent a little bit of time mapping out that journey deciding how you're going to play together within that so you feel a shared ownership over it and then make some choices about where you want to put your dollars but you should base that in performance and strategy not in sales targets now cpus for framework you've come up for in the book haven't you to kind of map out the bio journey you've got five five stages haven't you so talk me through what those five stages are and then let's talk about then how you might market differently in each of them yeah so i start with the horizon scanner so these are these people who are looking out into the world and going what are the macro economic trends what are the business trends that mean that i might need to do something differently to how i do things today and that's a sort of more speculative there's no brief there's no business case it's a it tends to be a more senior person thinking strategically about what they want to do with their business we then move to what i call the explorer so that's the point at which they're going probably need to do something but we're not quite sure what so it's early stage business case development trying to galvanize support from the organization to be able to put together a business case and starting to really formulate what actually is the problem statement that we're going to market with the third area is hunter so that's where the problem is reasonably really well-defined and they're in the market looking to see what types of provider can help them to solve that problem.

35:22Then the fourth phase is around active buyer. So you're making choices. So that's where you as a supplier competing with a small set of other people who are offering similar types of services and you're in competition. And then I go into that kind of longer term client or customer where you're marketing to them to drive loyalty or share of wallet over a course of years. The thing that I do talk about in the book as well is that when the client already has a pretty well-defined problem, they're probably coming in at that hunter stage. They might not be doing the horizon scanner or the explorer.

35:53So some people go through the whole journey or some organizations go through this whole journey. Some come in at that point. And even within PwC, for example, if you're buying audit or you're buying tax advice from it, like you have a pretty well-defined problem. You know, so you're coming in at that stage versus people who are doing big, complicated transformations or implementing AI into their front office that they're probably going through the whole the whole piece so so knowing what your buyer is trying to do and and what I try and say in the book is that at each stage you probably got a different set of people and they have different information requirements and your job in marketing and sales is to service the buyer's information requirements your job shouldn't be to help the sales team make their target that makes so much sense I mean I mean even in what we do at system one I get I get calls from people going, help, we've got a crisis.